Industrial automation systems can include tens to hundreds of controllers to monitor and control sets of subsystems. Examples of such applications include a power plant, a factory, a refinery, a power distribution site, a wind or solar farm, building systems, among others.
One type of controllers in an industrial automation system has slots to receive mountable input-output modules and submodules to tailor the IO of the controller for a specific industrial automation application. The individual input-output module and submodule may include numerous digital and analog input and/or output channels to monitor or sense a variety of different types of input signals such as thermocouple inputs, resistance temperature detectors (RTDs), currents, voltages, capacitances, inductances, and resistances, and provide corresponding outputs. Once coupled to the controller, the controller and its input-output modules (and submodules thereof) are programmably configurable, via a development software, with a specific hardware configuration for each respective input-outputs.
As industrial communication networks grow in complexity, the configuration of devices in such industrial networks becomes a resource-intensive endeavor. For example, each individual controller, such as programmable logic controllers and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, may have tens to hundreds of input-output modules and submodules. The process of configuring IO devices and modules (i.e., to establish configuration of the IO devices and modules) is, for the most part, a manual operation. That is, in the development software, an operator would set individual parameters for, for example, a given IO devices and its modules or submodules.
What are needed are devices, systems and methods that overcome challenges in the present art, some of which are described above.